User:Oceanflynn/sandbox/Mia Feuer

 Mia Feuer  (born in 1981 in Winnipeg, Manitoba) is a sculptural artist based in Washington, DC.

Biography
Feuer graduated from the University of Manitoba with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) degree in 2004 and obtained a master’s degree from the world-famous sculpture program at Virginia Commonwealth University in 2009. She is an Assistant Professor in Sculpture and Art Foundation at George Mason University, Fairfax, VA. Feuer "has received numerous travel/research, production and creation grants from the Manitoba Arts Council, the Winnipeg Arts Council, The Canada Council for the Arts, The Jewish Foundation of Manitoba and The Lila Acheson Readers Digest Foundation. In 2007, supported by The Winnipeg Arts Council, she travelled to Palestine to facilitate sculptural workshops in the West Bank with Palestinian children. She has received a full two-month fellowship at Vermont Studio Center, a two month fellowship at Seven Below Arts Initiative in Burlington, VT and has been invited to participate in a Millay Colony for the Arts residency in 2010 and a residency with Bemis Center for Contemporary Art in 2011."

She first came to international attention for her work at the in ,

Her largest show to date was an exhibition entitled "An Unkindness" at the prestigious Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC from November 2013 to February 2014, which was informed by her "experiences in the oil-producing landscapes of the Canadian tar sands, the Arctic Circle, and the Suez Canal."

In his exhibition review, Haig-Brown Heritage House's writer-in-residence Andrew Nikiforuk, who met with Feuer several times, described her visit to reclamation sites in the Athabaska Oil Sands (AOS) in the Fort McMurray area several years ago.

"After digging up low-lying peat lands, fens and rivers to mine bitumen, industry replaces complex boreal landscapes with artificial, man-made hills made with layers of mining waste, including petroleum coke and salt-laden sands. The process also includes dumping toxic mining waste into pits and then capping the pits with freshwater: an untested form of reclamation. Because peatlands, which occupy 65 per cent of the mineable area, take 10,000 years to make, there is no requirement for industry to restore them. Nor is there any legal requirement to replace wetlands with wetlands, as most industrial nations now mandate, because of the high cost to industry -- up to $12 billion. After building sandy uplands, industry then attempts to grow salt-tolerant plants on engineered soils. Scientists calculate that it may take 200 years to determine if the man-made sculptures can survive droughts, forest fires, erosion, insects, pathogens, or bitumen pollutants."

- Nikiforuk 2014

The title the unkindness of ravens was inspired in part by trees planted upside down on one reclamation site to attract ravens by providing potential nesting areas. The ravens would prey on destructive rodents that destroyed the newly planted wheat crops on the reclaimed land. Feuer described it as a "twisted-demented nursery rhyme."

"I stood in a land that was once boreal forest, that was now a bunch of toxic wheat grown in toxic earth"

- Mia Feuer 2014